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H263 Language, Culture and the Unconscious
Lecture 2: Dreams, jokes, and the hidden text; the meaning of symptoms

Garry Gillard

4 August 1992

[Overhead 1]
The set text of Freud's, as you know, is the Introductory Lectures of 1916-7.  You may also wish to read—or may have done so already—The Interpretation of Dreams (1900); The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905).  Then there are the case studies, including the (in)famous one on 'Dora' (1905) which Freud wrote up in 1900-1, the Metapsychological papers of 1915 (including the one on 'The Unconscious', and then the works on culture, including Totem and Taboo (1912), and Civilisation and its Discontents (1930).

Language, interpretation, instruction

[Overhead 2]
I'll begin with a discussion of the degree to which language is integral to the theory of psychoanalysis, and by talking about the linguistic functions: translation, interpretation, and instruction.

You may recall that I had a bit to say about translation in my first lecture, and about the idea of translating sets of cultural phenomena from one area of human life into another, from one 'discipline' to another.  I mentioned in that lecture that Freud, for example, speaks of the task of translating the symbolic language of dreams into that of our waking thought. 1  A few pages further on in the Introductory Lectures he speaks of the dreamwork making a translation of thoughts into another form—a 'rendering, as it were, into another script or language.' 2

[But, he continues,] the dream-work carries out a very unusual kind of transcription of the dream-thoughts: it is not a word-for-word or a sign-for sign translation; nor is it a selection made according to fixed rules—as though one were to reproduce only the consonants in a word and to leave out the vowels; nor is it what might be described as a representative selection—one element being invariably chosen to take the place of several; it is something different and far more complicated. 3

Freud is talking here about functions of language.  In psychoanalysis the idea is that what actually happens—in terms of gross behaviour in the analytic session—is that the patient talks to the analyst and the analyst talks back, offering interpretation.  And as a result of that, and through the relationship they develop (Freud's word is 'transference') the patient may get better.

Here is another description of the way language works in the analytic session, from Elizabeth Grosz, referring to Jacques Lacan, a post-Freudian analyst and theorist.  (Jenny Nash will be using Lacan next week.)  I quote from Grosz.

[Overhead 3]
[Lacan], she says, 'reads Freud's project not as strengthening the ego nor adapting the individual through conformity to his or her cultural role.  It is nothing more, nor less, than an interrogation of the unconscious. ... He insisted on seeing it as a form of listening or reading, placing it in the context of semiotics, linguistics and literature, as Freud himself suggests. 4

[Lacan himself] said of the analytic method: 'Its means are those of parole [individual act of speaking] in that it confers a meaning upon the functions of an individual; its domain is that of concrete discourse [langage??] as the transindividual reality of the subject; its operations are historical in that it constitutes the emergence of the truth into reality.'
 
Freud also thought that 'language' of dreams was of great interest, and devoted one of his most ground-breaking books to the interpretation of that 'language'. 6 Though I should perhaps note in passing that Émile Benveniste  goes to some trouble to show that we should read 'language' in this context as being in quotation marks, as he says the symbolism of a natural language is quite different from that of dreams. 7  (We will return to Benveniste in the last lecture of the course.  There is a reading by him near the end of the Reader.)

In the Introductory Lectures Freud goes over the ground covered by the Interpretation of Dreams again, and I refer here briefly to the discussion in Lecture 10, Symbolism in Dreams (which could equally well have been called The Language of Dreams). 8

Freud appears to believe, at least as a working hypothesis, that there is what he calls a 'basic language' of which all symbolic relations would be residues. 9  The unconscious speaks this 'basic language', but expresses it indirectly in these symbolic residues, in dreams, myths, fairy tales, and in sayings and songs, in colloquial linguistic usage and in the poetic imagination.  The field in which most of this 'basic language' has survived is that of the neuroses, with its material being the symptoms and other manifestations of neurotic patients. And he tells us that he is prepared to follow a philologist called Sperber (a philologist is a historian of language) in seeing the expression of sexual needs as intrinsic with the origin and development of speech. 10  (This view is no longer held by linguists, however.)

Translation, condensation, displacement

I would not want you to think of translation, in Freud, as being a simple matter—as the subtitles on SBS may appear to be—but as having to take account of certain special processes, the discovery and dissemination of which have been among the more useful of Freud's many legacies to intellectual life.  He deals with these in Lecture 11, The Dream-Work.  He uses this term to refer to 'the work which transforms the latent dream into the manifest one'. 11  [Latent means 'hidden', and 'manifest' means 'shown forth' — although etymologically it means 'made with the hands'.]

[Overhead 4]
The processes I'm referring to are 'condensation' and displacement'.  By 'condensation' 'we understand the fact that the manifest dream has a smaller content than the latent one, and is thus an abbreviated translation of it.'  Or, more specifically, condensation is brought about 'by latent elements which have something in common being combined and fused into a single unity in the manifest dream.' 12

Displacement 'manifests itself in two ways: in the first, a latent element is replaced not by a component part of itself but by something more remote—that is, by an allusion; and in the second, the psychical accent is shifted from an important element on to another which is unimportant, so that the dream appears differently centred and strange.' 13

Freud points out, that in the process of the translation of thoughts by the dreamwork into the manifest dream that a strange kind of translation has taken place.  Whereas normally a translation 'endeavours to preserve the distinction made in the text and particularly to keep things that are similar separate,' the dreamwork 'tries to condense two different thoughts by seeking out (like a joke) an ambiguous word'—or image, or symbol—'in which the two thoughts may come together.' 14

If Freud is right—or perhaps I should rather say: if it is an idea with significant explanatory power—that the operations of a dream are the same as those of myths, fairy tales, and in common sayings and folk songs (and I might add, in jokes), in colloquial linguistic usage and in the poetic imagination—then attention to the functions of condensation and displacement should yield considerable benefit.  And if you add Freud's third attribute of the dream-work: that it translates thoughts into visual images, then you've got all the visual and plastic arts covered as well.  The implications of the operation of these relatively simple processes—condensation and displacement—have already proved to be of great interest to students of literature—as have those of his fourth function, symbolism—but they should also prove to be of great interest to students of this course.  Bear them in mind for later on.  Freud himself says this—making a perfect connexion for our course.

[Overhead 5]
Condensations, displacements, regressive transformations of thoughts into images—such things are novelties whose discovery has already richly rewarded the labours of psychoanalysis.  And you can see once more, from the parallels to the dream-work, the connections which have been revealed between psychoanalytic studies and other fields—especially those concerned in the development of speech and thought. 15

Culture

[Overhead 6]
As for culture: you might remember in the quotation a few minutes ago about the analytic cure, Freud was developing the idea of a struggle within the self between the ego and the libido—or 'id', as he later calls the unconscious.  It was out this notion that in his later work he came to see culture as being in conflict with desire.  But first, another 'translator's note'.  In this later topology of the self, Freud used the everyday German words for 'I' and 'it' as the names for the conscious and the unconscious selves: 'Ich' and 'Es'  Rather than use 'I' and 'it' Freud's translator Strachey substituted the Latin words 'ego' and 'id'—which we're now stuck with.  I suppose Strachey thought that 'the I' would just look too bizarre in English, whereas 'das Ich' sounds a bit more substantial.  Be that as it may, when Freud decided that he had to divide the self into two to accommodate what he saw as its moral function he called the supervising paternalistic part the 'over-I', das Überich; and this is 'translated' via Latin as 'superego'. 16

Now, in Civilization and its Discontents, one of Freud's last works, he returns to the same kind of sociology he had employed in another, slightly earlier, work, Totem and Taboo.  In Civilization, Freud argues that the individual and culture are actually in opposition to each other, in other words, that civilisation is bad for you.  To put it more formally, in the words of Freud's editor: The main theme of the book [is] 'the irremediable antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of civilization.' 17

Freud argues that there are two urges in the individual human being which are in conflict with each other, 'the one towards personal happiness and the other towards union with other human beings' and that 'the two processes of individual and of cultural development must stand in hostile opposition to each other and mutually dispute the ground'. 18

Although he developed this most fully in 1930 in Civilization and its Discontents, it seems to me that Freud had the idea fully formed fifteen years before when he wrote the Introductory Lectures.  See page 47 of the Penguin edition, for example, where he writes this.

[Overhead 7]
We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts; and we believe that civilization is to a large extent being constantly created anew, since each individual who makes a fresh entry into human society repeats this sacrifice of instinctual satisfaction for the benefit of the whole community. 19

And he introduces here another key idea, the importance and usefulness of which I want to impress on you: sublimation.  His own definition in the Introductory Lectures is quite clear, so I continue the quotation.

Among the instinctual forces which are put to this use the sexual impulses play an important part; in this process they are sublimated—that is to say, they are diverted from their sexual aims and directed to others that are socially higher and no longer sexual. 20

In this passage, which I recommend for your close study, because it is an excellent summary of the whole controversy surrounding psychoanalysis, Freud makes it clear that his view of the human being is that it is an organism characterised by powerful, potentially dangerous drives inserted into a society which requires that this energy be harnessed and put to uses consistent with the aims of that society.  And it is this harnessing, or chanelling, that he calls sublimation.  What emerges from the process is culture, some aspects of which are the capital C kind of Culture: 'the highest cultural, artistic and social creations of the human spirit.' 21  These creations, of course, include writing, in the sense of the creative use of language.  And it is specifically sexual instincts and drives which are sublimated into the emanations of the general cultural will.

I suppose we have always known, at least since the Greeks, that we are constrained by our culture in this way.  Freud's great discovery is supposed to be of the nature of what is constrained: the unconscious.  And it is through Freud's 'new science' of psychoanalysis that we have been able to become aware of the sexual basis of our instinctual drives, the way evidence of them slips out, in parapraxes, dreams and jokes, and their function, through sublimation, in creative thought.

***************
The hidden text
In the next part of what I'm going to say I'll be drawing on ideas developed for this course by Bob Hodge. 22 My text will be in the nature of a palimpsest — where a newer text is written over an older one.  I have literally written over Bob's ideas so that they conform with what I want to say.  I'll be condensing ideas from two of his lectures, displacing some of his ideas in favour of my own desires — of some of which I am conscious only after much free association in the shower and analysis with long-suffering friends and colleagues — and I'll also be sublimating my basic drive to do away with a portion of the patriarchy in this part of the lecture.

[Overhead 8]
Bob Hodge argues that Freudian psychoanalysis has two aspects which are of interest in this course:

1. it helps to show in what ways powerful social forces construct individual subjects (or individuals), BUT

2. it may have a pathological complicity with the process of social construction.

I hope to show how this works  by looking at the case study of the girl in Freud's Lecture 17.  You might in your turn wish to show how this works in your projects, if you choose to focus on Freud, because, as Bob says, forms of praxis give rise to original new ideas.  The thing is to combine theory and praxis; the process as well as the ideas.

Bob sees psychoanalysis as a machine for producing readings.  It takes texts—which is to understood in the broadest sense—including texts written on bodies—and analyses them.  No other cultural tradition, Bob points out, has a methodology of depth analysis of this kind.  And the unusual thing about this particular kind of readings is that Freudian meanings destabilise all other kinds of meaning; they tend to say that the others don't matter.

In this broad sense of the word 'text', then, Freudian psychoanalysis analyses the energies and desires of producers and receivers of texts.  This works at both macro and micro levels; both for human universals and for socially specific meanings: those of particular societies and of particular individuals within them.

1. The macro level is civilisation: Western civilisation can be seen as being like the symptom of a patient: a Western individual.  He or she is like a patient for Freud: it is the texts that this patient produces that the analyst interprets.  This hypothetical individual is the dreamer and joker and mythopoet of Western civilisation—as an aggregate. 23

2. At the micro level: there are socially specific meanings—although correspondences may be established with universals.  For example Freud's Vienna may be seen as representative of only one cultural sub-set, and a number of fairly recent critiques of Freud have drawn attention to the fact that some of his hypotheses arise specifically out of the society from which his clients came: the sexually repressed, over-dressed and over-controlled middle-class of nineteenth-century Vienna.  Some of the dreams recorded by Freud are like short stories or novels of Viennese cultural life—narratives of the Oedipus complex with its patriarchal father, complicit mother, and seduced son.  (Although there is a spectrum of family types.) 24  For Freud, however, it is possible to extrapolate from the society in which he worked to a universal level, related to the totality of human experience.

Freudian psychoanalysis is firstly
1. process-driven: by the dreamwork, jokework, story behind the analysis:
from this perspective we look at how texts are constructed. 25  Meaning is not in a text as such: the latent and manifest meanings exist in relation to people in response to an organisation of forces.  So these meanings are drawn from interpreters—or 'participant observers' might be a better term, as we are talking about the people involved in the analytic process, the clients.

A criticism that is made of Freud with regard to these textual analyses is that these are over-readings: however, if something is hidden—and this is an idea fundamental to this course—if something is hidden, then a force must be causing that.  Freud himself writes of the desirability of and necessity for what he defines as 'over-interpretation'. 26

Freudian psychoanalysis is, secondly,
2. model-driven: it's a machine for reproducing pre-existing meanings. 27  And here we have in mind principally the Freudian metapsychological topology of mind, with its tripartite structure.  For this next section, which is rather technical, I'm indebted to Elizabeth Wright.

[Overhead 8A]
[Freud] looks at the mind from three points of view: the 'dynamic', the 'economic' and 'topographical'. 28

The 'dynamic' point of view stresses the interplay of forces within the mind, arising from the tensions that develop when instinctual drives meet the necessities of external reality.

From the 'economic' point of view pleasure results from a decrease in the degree to which the body is disturbed by any stimulus.  Unpleasure results from an increase in disturbance.  In the interaction of the body with the external environment a part of the mind Freud calls the 'ego' evolves to mediate the actions of the body so as to achieve the optimal satisfaction of its needs … Under the economic model this is viewed as a struggle between the 'reality principle' and the 'pleasure principle', in which the body has to learn to postpone pleasure and accept a degree of unpleasure in order to comply with social demands.

The third point of view is the 'topographical' of which there are two versions.  In the first … Freud sees the mind as having a three-fold division, conscious, preconscious and unconscious. … the second version … was introduced … in 1923, when he came to view the mind as having three distinct agencies: the 'id', a term applied retrospectively to the instinctual drives that spring from the constitutional needs of the body; the ego as having developed out of the id to be an agency which regulates and opposes the drives; and the 'super-ego', as representative of parental social influences upon the drives, a transformation of them rather than an external agency. 29

The meaning of symptoms
That's my version of what Bob Hodge covered in the lecture he called 'Dreams, jokes and the hidden text'.  I now move on to 'The meaning of symptoms', and the Lecture (almost) by that name by Freud in the Introductory Lectures.  I'm sorry if you haven't had time to read this yet: it's set out in pages 303-309.  Once again I'll at least begin by following Bob Hodge.

'Dreams, jokes and the hidden text' is the right place to start with Freud. … That's where he starts … that's his general account of normal processes, and although there's a dialectic between his theory of normal processes and his theory of abnormal processes, there are certain things he's able to see going on in normal processes which don't tend to stand out, so he needed to go into psychopathology.

We're certainly not training you in this course to be psychoanalysts.  … We're using Freud's theories as a way into the analysis of culture, of general social phenomena, and texts which are widely available.  … Freud's general theories of normal processes have stood the test of time better than his particular observations about pathology and the particular Freudian forms of intervention.

I'll be referring to Lecture 17 on 'The Meaning of Symptoms' in the Introductory Lectures … and mainly looking at the case of the 19-year-old girl with the obsessive-compulsive sleep ritual and agoraphobia, and not only reading the text as well as it is possible to from Freud's account, and following Freud's own reading, but also reading against the grain of that interpretation to see where other lines of thought might lead.  What we are interested in is the processes that Freud uncovers, generalising from them, seeing how far they go, seeing where they don't go, where you need to modify the theory.  So this is an exercise in a particular strategy of theory-building, a particular strategy of developing and modifying textual analysis.  The focus on symptoms brings together all the key issues raised by Freud.  So it's a very good place to make the first cut in an entry into Freud's methods of analysis.

This is a pathological case study of a symptom.  Now symptoms are by definition aberrant texts, and the processes which construct the symptom-texts are, according to Freud, identical to the processes which construct dream-texts, joke-texts, and the whole lot. So with these texts, as with any other kind of text, we should see and be able to trace all of the Freudian processes at work, and we should be able to discriminate between them, see where we would need to refine the model, or whatever.

Secondly, these are symptoms which are inscribed on bodies.  There's always something about joke-texts, dream-texts which makes them seem inherently trivial.  They are merely surface phenomena … illustrative instances and it's the same with slips of the tongue.  Symptoms are quite different.  The symptom that Freud describes here disables the life of the person who suffers it.  And so we agree to call it a symptom or not, Freud's claim would be supported by all the other participants—they would all agree that this particular behaviour really needs understanding.  This is not only symptomatic of important meanings, but it concentrates, through actions of the body, through control of the body, those meanings as they act on everyday life.

In the case of the 19-year-old girl with the obsessive-compulsive sleep ritual we have a ritual designed to induce sleep which takes two hours of non-sleep to be completed.  So there's a contradiction in the ritual.

Now if she only did this action once in her life, it would be exactly like a dream, and you wouldn't know which behaviour in the evening to focus on.  …  The important thing about this ritual is that it's repeated.  … What we want to do in this course is go from phenomena which are regarded as purely private, personal, individual, idiosyncratic to general features of social life.  And culture, in a sense, is what is repeated: that's part of the definition of culture.  It is a set of behaviours, meanings and so on which are repeated between different individuals of the same social group, and from generation to generation.   Culture is an instrument of repetition.  And the field of the cultural is most clearly defined—and most precisely—by what is most obsessively repeated.  So in a sense you can see that culture as an easily available object for analysis anyway as it's commonly understood has at least that defining characteristic of obsessional neurosis.

A second characteristic which is equally important is senselessness.  There is either no reason (for the repetition) or no-one knows what the reason is.  And in a sense we can say that of culture also that culture is as it is not because it has a reason to be but precisely the opposite because it has no reason to be.  Culture—like symptoms—is meaningless repetition. 

And, finally, it is compulsive meaningless repetition.

***************************

Turning now to the case of the nineteen-year-old obsessive 'girl', and to Freud's account of it: and we must read both as texts, as narratives to which we will apply our methods of textual analysis—and we find that the processes of condensation and displacement that I mentioned earlier in this lecture are in operation.  [Describe case.]  The pillow is a representation of the female as the bedstead displaces the male, and the clocks and watches are condensations of both time and of the female genitals.

However, these operations are not immediately apparent to the girl, who 'gradually came to learn that it was as symbols of the female genitals that clocks were banished from her equipment for the night.'  Whether her conscious mind allowed these thoughts to come up from the unconscious, or whether she finally allowed herself to be persuaded by her determined analyst, we are told that accepts Freud's interpretation of her story, but only after some time.

She found out the central meaning of her ceremonial one day when she suddenly understood the meaning of the rule that the pillow must not touch the back of the bedstead.  The pillow, she said, had always been a woman to her and the upright wooden back a man.  Thus she wanted—by magic, we must interpolate—to keep the man and woman apart—that is, to separate her parents from each other, not to allow them to have sexual intercourse. 30

It is these interpolations of Freud's that I find interesting.  Why 'must' he interpolate that it was by magic that she wanted to keep her parents apart: where does this desire to interpolate come from?  Why these authorial intrusions into the story?  Where do the 'phantasies' come from in the last sentence of this quotation?

Finally, when she was so big that it became physically uncomfortable for her to find room in the bed between her parents, she managed, by a conscious simulation of anxiety, to arrange for the mother to exchange places with her for the night and to leave her own place so that the patient could sleep beside her father.  This situation no doubt became the starting-point of phantasies whose after-effect was to be seen in the ceremonial. 31

If you read the sentence without the 'phantasies' it still makes sense (don't you think?): 'This situation no doubt became the starting-point of [the] … after-effects[s] … to be seen in the ceremonial.'  And why is the anxiety 'simulated'—anxiety associated with the desire to sleep with—or not to sleep with—her father?  Who is doing the simulation, and whose is the phantasy?

It's worth pointing out at this point that the female patients whom Freud saw would have had their accounts paid by their husbands or their fathers: they would have been the ones who brought the women to Freud for normalisation.  This is the kind of thing I had in mind earlier when I referred to psychoanalysis as having a 'pathological complicity with the process of social construction.'

The curious thing, though, finally, about the Freudian method of textual analysis, is that although when applied to itself it finds itself crucially flawed, it still remains paradoxically intact, having proved itself functional in operation.  The distortions wrought by desire—the condensations and displacements—turn out to be an essential part of any account and any interpretation, including a Freudian one.

***************************

We could now extrapolate to some other cultural texts, or cultural phenomena which are exemplified by particular texts, where exactly the same analysis that Freud is engaged in could now be applied—where your critique of Freud would apply to these new areas and perhaps might enable you to be more effective in analysing them.

For example: superstitions, etiquette, rituals, games, mannerisms, group rituals—all of these can be analysed in the same way that Freud analyses neurotic symptoms.  We 32 are not, however, saying that these phenomena are either neurotic or symptoms.  What we are saying is that they are characterised by the same compulsive meaningless repetition.

If we had enough tutorials you could discuss some superstitions in this light, or some points of etiquette.  Why, for example, do many people feel so strongly about whether—or not—a man should hold a door open for a woman, or stand when a woman comes into the room?

Sport in general is clearly a case where superficially rationalist methods of analysis are inappropriate; because you immediately come up against how important this phenomenon seems to be for participants, and how inexplicable that importance is to anyone outside it, and what I am trying to suggest as a strength of the Freudian approach is that it, unlike any other method of analysis, far from being troubled by this, can incorporate it immediately and directly into the analysis.

And the inquiry can be extended also to the 'ethics' of sport: why, you might ask, do people feel so strongly about 'drugs in sport' and the current 'Drug Olympics'; why is it a 'scandal' when two British weight-lifters are sent home for taking clenbuterol, whether for their asthma or to fatten their calves—and when a runner emulates his hero to the extent, like him, of using anabolic steroids.  I leave all of these questions for you to discuss later.

Footnotes

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